Buzzing flies, rotting banana peels, and soggy coffee grounds are not your typical high schooler’s cup of tea (you can compost tea leaves, by the way). The smell alone deters many from having anything to do with composting, despite its well-proven benefits. Within institutions like schools, composting bins can also be hard to manage. Leaving them unattended overnight, even once, leads to fruit fly infestations and local health department complaints. Despite all these challenges and possible qualms, junior Josie Ditmars took Westford Academy’s composting initiative into her own hands.
Composting Club is the most recent in a series of attempts to give WA a reliable way to compost. Established at the end of the 2024-2025 school year and set to start at the beginning of the following school year, the club was taken over by Ditmars alongside juniors Ahana Sacheti and Amisha Shanmuganath after the WA National Honor Society (NHS) was unable to maintain the composting bins.
The original composting initiative for the school began in 2015, when English teacher Rebecca Shaw and the WA Environmental Club, supported by Westford Recycling Commission (WRC) and Westford Community Composting (WCC), started the WA Composting Program. According to WCC’s founder, Sharon Chew, the goal was to use leftover food from the school as compost rather than throwing the scraps away.
Chew managed the WA Composting Program until September of 2023, when it transitioned into WA’s first official composting club advised by science teacher Constance Menice. According to Murphy, Menice taught all the members what to do and how to do it–she even created a calendar to keep shifts organized. However, despite these efforts, the club was unable to maintain a constant schedule. By the end of the year, Menice was singlehandedly managing the school’s composting.
“Even if 75% of [the composting shifts] got done, the 25% that wasn’t getting done was just too much,” Murphy said. “If somebody has a book collection [and] the books sit for two weeks and no one touches them, it’s okay, right? But you just can’t do that with compost.”
Then, during the 2024-2025 school year, the composting initiative was taken up by NHS. Still, the same problem persisted, with volunteering students not being consistent and failing to empty the bins each night. Finally, towards the end of the same year, Ditmars reached out to NHS adviser and math teacher Gilbert Fuhr inquiring about composting at WA and asking if she could spearhead a new initiative. Fuhr relayed the information to Murphy who readily agreed.
“I noticed [that] since it’s a requirement to take a fruit or vegetable at lunch, not a lot of kids tend to eat it. It just ends up in the trash and later in landfills, when it could be used in a more regenerative and bio-friendly way,” Ditmars said.
Ditmars reached out to two classmates, Sacheti and Shanmuganath–all having a collective passion towards composting and the environment–to help get WA’s newest Composting Club on its feet. According to Sacheti, both were eager to help.
So far, the club has put up one bin in the cafeteria, located near the stairs leading to the upper cafeteria. As it says on a sign above a bright yellow container, it takes fruit and vegetables only. According to Murphy, starting off with only one bin was a well-made decision.
“In the past, [previous composting volunteers] always put out one [bin] by each [trash barrel], and that was a big undertaking,” Murphy said. “So I think [Ditmars] was smart in saying, ‘Let me just put out one and see who’s going to [take care of it].'”
According to Murphy and the three founders, Composting Club eventually hopes to create enough compost to sell bags of it locally helping others grow their gardens. The money collected from the sales would then be used to buy any extra bins or supplies the club may need.
Other future projects for the club include maintaining and cultivating the WA garden, which the club has begun to work on this year. This task involves clearing the gardens before winter and preparing them for the spring.
“We definitely want to restart the school gardens again and start using them,” Sacheti said. “We want to build enough compost this year to start using [the gardens] again next spring and grow our own produce.”
At their most recent meeting on Thursday, Oct. 23, Composting Club assisted Murphy and a few other clubs in planting 100 yellow tulip bulbs, donated by Emerson Health for Suicide Awareness Month. The bulbs, planted near the flag lobby entrance to the school, are predicted to bloom sometime in the spring.
Ditmars informs new and interested members that the club does not involve copious amounts of work or commitment. Signing up for shifts based on availability grants members both community service hours and, according to Shanmuganath, a priceless experience of giving back to the school.
“It’s such an invaluable opportunity,” Shanmuganath said. “It’s fulfilling to know that because of the work you put in, our school and the environment [are] a little bit better for everyone.”
This article was updated on Nov. 10, 2025 to correct an error. Originally, the article stated that founding director of Sustainable Westford Gloria Gilbert began the initial composting initiative at Westford Academy. However, the initiative was started by English teacher Rebecca Shaw and the WA Environmental Club, and managed by Sharon Chew, founder of Westford Community Composting.
